Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present
edited by Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash
Oxford University Press, 407 pp., $50.00
Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
by Timothy Garton Ash
Yale University Press, 441 pp., $35.00
Amid both the gloom of the season and the recent uprisings in the Arab world, it is bracing to look back at the last thirty years or so and see how much has actually gone more or less well. The end of the cold war, the demise of communism, and the emergence of new democratic states of varying quality all represent important historical change. Most of the radical political and economic transformations of the last quarter-century, moreover, have been brought about with little or no bloodshed.
